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Preregistration of hypotheses.

Multiple team membership (MTM), a phenomenon where an individual is simultaneously a member of more than one team at a time, is increasingly present in organizational practice. In line with that, more and more attention to MTM is also being devoted from scholars, especially related to individual and team performance. However, we know little on how individuals in multiple teams should be led. Our study shades light on this topic and suggests that specific forms of organizing, such as MTM require specific forms of leadership to benefit individuals’ performance. In an experimental design, we manipulated two types of leadership, namely charismatic and boundary spanning leadership in a single team (at Time 1) and in a MTM setting (at Time 2) while aiming to study their effects on individual performance. Data retrieved from 118 students participating in an undergraduate course at a Dutch university reveals that participants exposed to boundary spanning leadership show a significant increase in performance between Time 1 and Time 2 at a significantly greater level of change than the participants exposed to charismatic leadership. This suggest that boundary spanning leadership is favorable in situations where a team member needs to be bridged with information beyond the borders of one single team. These results have implications for management practice as they show which type of leadership are the most relevant for MTM settings.

Organizations use teams as an adaptive and flexible response to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Team adaptive performance, which is team performance under changing environmental conditions, can be facilitated by motivational mechanisms. In this paper, we investigated the effect of team rewards on team adaptive performance. Noting the temporal nature of team adaptation and emergent states, we hypothesized that team reward stability (as compared to instability) would result in higher team adaptive performance. We further posited that team efficacy beliefs and team distributive fairness perceptions would partially mediate this relationship. We used a between-subjects (team reward condition: stable or unstable) experimental study with 43 3-person student teams who performed a coordination task with a change in the task at midpoint. The empirical results supported our predictions. Team distributive fairness perceptions fully mediated the relationship between team reward stability and team adaptive performance. Thus, our paper highlights the importance of team rewards on team adaptation

Project networks are an increasingly salient organisational temporary form to deal with complex problems. It remains unclear, however, whether and how project networks adapt over time, and hence implement changes, both within the span of the specific project, and across projects. The authors apply the performance feedback (PF) perspective to explore how adaptive responses to PF are organised and absorbed within project networks. The authors investigate these matters in the area of humanitarian and development aid efforts, which represent complex social issues. In this context, project networks involve a multitude of actors at different distances from the implementation field, ranging from the donor, through an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), to the NGO’s country offices, local NGOs and the beneficiary communities. This study’s qualitative findings, which the authors generate through an abductive analytical process, highlight that project networks dealing with complex social issues face six paradoxes based on work by DeFillippi and Sydow: the distance, difference, identity, learning, temporal and performance paradoxes. Collective goal setting, adaptive monitoring and evaluation practices, and continuous re-negotiation of aspiration levels emerge as coping mechanisms enabling project networks to internalise insights from the field and translate them into adaptive behavioural responses, mainly at the intra-project level. The authors contribute to a better understanding of adaption in these temporary forms, and particularly in its behavioural consequences. The study also advances knowledge on the PF perspective, through its application in temporary settings, on the level of the project network and in the context of complex social issues, where organisational arrangements strive to pursue multiple interdependent goals.

Firm innovation not only is a product of internal processes of knowledge differentiation and integration. It also depends on factors in the external environment of the firm stimulating or hindering these processes. This study examines external conditions for knowledge integration and differentiation among innovating South African manufacturing firms. Many South African organizations are technology-followers focused on incremental innovation by exploiting existing technologies. Informed by network and geographical theoretical perspectives, four external conditions for knowledge integration and differentiation were identified: network range and development zone (for knowledge differentiation), geographical relational embeddedness and spatial immobility (for knowledge integration). On the one hand it is found that in the South African context, a higher level of diversity of external knowledge sources (network range) is associated with a higher probability of exploitative product innovation. On the other hand, when firms are more strongly embedded in domestic inter-organizational networks (higher geographical relational embeddedness), the probability of generating exploitative product innovation is lower. The results also show that the positive effect of network range is more positive for higher levels of geographic relational embeddedness.

We meta-analyze the influence of various forms of embeddedness and proximity on interorganizational tie formation with a dataset that encompasses 256,529 ties from 73 studies. First, we uncover the unparalleled importance of relational embeddedness, while the influence of structural and positional embeddedness turns out to be highly dependent on the context. Second, we show that various forms of proximity positively influence tie formation and have unique explanatory power in addition to the embeddedness dimensions. Last, we explore to what extent these effects are contingent on the type of tie, resource munificence, status orientation, level of individuality, and intellectual property regimes. Our study introduces a preliminary contingency theory of interorganizational tie formation and provides directions for future research.

We meta-analyze the influence of important embeddedness dimensions and proximity dimensions on interorganizational tie formation with a dataset that encompasses more than 250,000 ties from 75 studies. First, we uncover that various forms of embeddedness, relational in particular, have different effects on tie formation and that not all types of embeddedness are equally important. Second, we confirm that various forms of proximity positively influence tie formation and have unique explanatory power in addition to the embeddedness dimensions. Last, we reveal that influences of embeddedness and proximity on tie formation are contingent on the type of tie (R&D, investment, or manufacturing). Our findings provide support for the positive influence of embeddedness and proximity on tie formation, but warrant an unequivocal application of these influences in different contexts.